I
’m real sorry about this cover photo. The original featured two fetching young ladies in various stages of deshabille, to my tastes the crown jewel in Roxy’s family of femme fatales. Prudish interests prevailed, however, and the ladies soon dematerialized, leaving in their wake the unsatisfactory scenery above. Fortunately, the censors didn’t mess with the music. Song for song, this is as good as Roxy gets. Country Life finds the band at a stylistic crossroads, embracing shorter, lyrical songs while retaining the dark and challenging tone of their earlier work. It’s not so much different than Stranded, which also featured rocket-propelled pop music alongside torch songs that twisted like a slow, sharp knife. Although critics fell in love with Siren’s song, I always found that album too chipper. In my opinion, “All I Want Is You” and “Casanova” get to the heart of what made Roxy Music great, while “Sentimental Fool” and “She Sells” came across as cornball. The album opens with “The Thrill Of It All” -- this would be stripped down and re-cast as “Love Is The Drug” on their next album, and you can decide which is the better track. What follows is a varied sampler of settings: romantic and dreamy art rock (“Out of the Blue”), a fine approximation of Bob Ezrin’s Teutonic dramas (“Bitter-Sweet”), a masterful stare-down from Ferry (“Casanova”) and more. Maybe Siren tried too hard; Country Life burns with a cool fire, the beneficiary of the band’s and John Punter’s even-handed production. Ferry’s stilted vocals, wafting on a swirling cloud of sounds, wouldn’t sound this subdued again until Avalon. In a way, Country Life can be seen as Avalon’s thorny cousin; though separated by years, the two albums come closest to reconciling the band’s instrumental chops and Ferry’s romantic fantasies. I’d pick Country Life as the ideal entry point into Roxy Music, since it straddles both halves of their musical world better than any other album.

"The girls on Country Life were the sister and girlfriend of Michael Karoli from the German rock group Can. We wanted it to be like they were at some amazing country house party, caught in the headlights of a car as they emerged from some encounter in their underwear." -- Bryan Ferry. (Source: The Guardian, 6/14/97.)